Novel was made into a silent movie described as follows: While marooned on a desert island, Cecilie Vaughn and Donald Van Buren live as man and wife and she falls pregnant. Donald is attacked and believed dead and Cecilie is rescued. She visits his wealthy family, but they refuse to recognize her or her son and Donald's brother Rufus offers to make her his mistress. She agrees instead to a marriage proposal from the kindly family lawyer, before Donald returns and they are reunited.

Fannie (sometimes spelled Fanny) Heaslip Lea, the daughter of newspaperman James J. Lea and Margaret Heaslip, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. After attending public schools in New Orleans, she matriculated to H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College in New Orleans, where she received a B.A. in 1904, and did graduate work in English at Tulane University in Louisiana for two years after.[1]

Until her marriage in 1911, she wrote feature articles for New Orleans daily newspapers and short stories for magazines such as Harper's, a short story, "Little Anna and the Gentleman Adventurer", in the 1910 The Century Magazine and Woman's Home Companion.[2] Afterwards, she moved with her husband, Hamilton Pope Agee,[3] to Honolulu. Her first novel, Quicksands, was published in this year. She continued to write through the birth of a daughter, Anne Worthen. She divorced Agee in 1926 and moved to New York, publishing 19 novels and more than 100 stories, poems, and essays in various newspapers and journals, until her death in 1955.